There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or
a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea is also called
the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed
concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side
in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable
manner. There were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good and
true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between
sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow,
became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved in
our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The
whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out
of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his
nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before
the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian),
his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black,
savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses
than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger
circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.
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